This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Currently two major trends are becoming dominant in communication service provider (CSP) networks: network virtualization (NV) and software defined networking (SDN). However, at present there is no adequate technique to apply these emerging technologies to edge nodes, in particular those nodes that have dual control plane and user plane functionality and that are configurable to interface a mobile core network to other systems and networks.